URL:
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?64501>
Summary: grohtml(1): confusing sentence in "Bugs" section
Group: GNU roff
Submitter: barx
Submitted: Tue 01 Aug 2023 02:48:41 AM CDT
Category: Driver grohtml
Severity: 2 - Minor
Item Group: Documentation
Status: None
Privacy: Public
Assigned to: None
Open/Closed: Open
Discussion Lock: Any
Planned Release: None
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Follow-up Comments:
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Date: Tue 01 Aug 2023 02:48:41 AM CDT By: Dave <barx>
The grohtml man page (as of a Sep 19, 2020 commit) has this item under Bugs,
quoted here in its entirety:
"grohtml does not truly support hyphenation, but you can fool it into
hyphenating long input lines, which can appear in HTML output with a
hyphenated word followed by a space but no line break."
I find this sentence perplexing. I asked about it on the mailing list a month
ago (http://lists.gnu.org/r/groff/2023-07/msg00002.html), but no one
responded, meaning no one else understood it either, or its meaning was so
obvious no one wanted to waste their time on a reply.
The sentence makes a little more sense to me if I presume that a couple of the
words are typos, and mentally edit it to: "...hyphenating long input _WORDS_,
which can appear in HTML output _AS_ a hyphenated word followed by a
space..."
But even this does not clear up a couple of my questions:
* What bug is being documented here? (1) The act of fooling grohtml (i.e.,
you might inadvertently fool grohtml into doing this buggy thing), or (2) the
lack of hyphenation, for which fooling grohtml is the workaround? (My
suspicion is (1), since HTML documents should never contain hyphenated words,
but this isn't clear to me from this sentence, the only one in the man page
that mentions hyphenation.)
* _How_ does one so fool grohtml?
As a possible source of illumination, I looked up the commit that added this
sentence ([http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=051d5d5b
051d5d5b]), hoping its log entry might shed some light, but it did not. In
fact, nothing in the log even acknowledges any content changes, only style
ones, yet the commit itself alters the content of both items in grohtml(1)'s
Bugs section. This is unusual enough for the typically comprehensive Branden
log entry (and this one covers several less significant changes) that I wonder
if those Bugs changes weren't intended to be in this commit at all, but snuck
in with all the style changes.
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